‘Facing El Chapo’ offers a suspenseful standoff — after the first act

“Facing El Chapo”
R | 1 hour, 31 minutes
Director: Chava Cartas
Writers: Bernardo Esquinca, Héctor de Mauleón
Stars: Alfonso Herrera, Noé Hernández, Hector Kotsifakis

Netflix’s “Facing El Chapo” (original title “La Captura”) makes an unusual bet: Instead of building its story around Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, it turns the spotlight on two ordinary federal officers who stumble into the biggest arrest of their careers. 

Director Chava Cartas opens with Officer Arturo Carmona (Alfonso Herrera), who is haunted by nightmares from a past shooting and buried under money problems as his wife’s third pregnancy adds pressure to an already stretched household. It’s a deliberately small, human problem — how does a cop with two kids and a baby on the way cover the bills? — and it works precisely because it’s unglamorous. Viewers aren’t asked to root for a hero; they’re asked to worry about a guy picking up dangerous night shifts to keep his family afloat.

Unfortunately, the pacing doesn’t deliver. The film spends a long stretch of its first act establishing Arturo’s home life, his new partnership with the wary, watch-flashing Rosales (Noé Hernández), and the day-to-day grind of patrol work before the actual inciting incident — pulling over a car that happens to be carrying El Chapo himself — finally arrives. 

Once the arrest happens, though, the movie shifts gears, and this is where the excitement genuinely spikes. The rest of the runtime plays out almost in real time: two officers alone on the road with the most wanted man in the country, unsure which of their own colleagues might be compromised, waiting for backup that may or may not arrive in time. That central uncertainty — who can be trusted? — is the film’s strongest engine. It doesn’t need elaborate action to generate tension; it needs a car, a radio and the constant possibility that the next person in uniform might not be on their side.

El Chapo (Hector Kotsifakis) becomes the film’s best tool for keeping viewers locked in during this stretch. He doesn’t rage or threaten outright; he negotiates, needles and dangles enormous sums of money in the officers’ faces, forcing the audience to sit with the same temptation the characters are supposedly resisting. It’s a classic hostage-in-plain-sight dynamic, and it works.

But here’s the catch: the film wants audiences to feel the pull of that temptation, yet its heroes never truly waver. Rosales gets a fleeting moment of hesitation over the money and drops it almost immediately, never to raise it again. Arturo never considers it at all. For a story built entirely around the question of what these two men will do under pressure, the answer is never in doubt. 

Suspense depends on uncertainty, and a film that keeps insisting its protagonists are incorruptible is quietly deflating its own stakes. It’s easy to sense the film’s reluctance to complicate the real-life officers it’s honoring, but that same reluctance flattens them into figures rather than people, which makes it more difficult to stay emotionally locked in even as the countdown keep ticking.

Even so, what keeps the film from losing its audience entirely is craft outside the writing. The cinematography leans into cool, tense color work that gives even ordinary scenes — a gas station standoff, a motel hideout — the sense of dread. Viewers who’ve spent time with films like “End of Watch” will recognize the DNA: the partnership-under-fire structure, the sense that a single wrong turn could end everything. That familiarity is a double-edged sword for audiences — comforting for genre fans, predictable for anyone hoping for surprises.

Adding another layer of pull, the film benefits from being rooted in a real, relatively recent event. Knowing this happened — that two officers really did find themselves boxed into this exact situation in January 2016 — adds a layer of investment that fiction alone wouldn’t generate, even when the on-screen conversations feel a little too neat to be verbatim history.

At just more than 90 minutes, “Facing El Chapo” is most engaging exactly when it trusts its premise and does not try to turn the story into a large-scale action spectacle. Instead, it focuses on what happens when two ordinary officers find themselves in an extraordinary situation. This makes the film feel more personal, as the danger is seen through men who have little idea of what they have walked into.

For audiences willing to sit through a slower opening act, the back half delivers a tense, well-shot thriller. ♦